Imposing that agenda on a pan-European scale would have been next to impossible if the power rested on individual nation states.

If you want a model for Europe without the EU, look at the relationship between the EU and Norway, then replace the EU by the US, and Norway by the envisioned gaggle of pint-sized jokes pretending to be sovereign states.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Beg your pardon!? Non-EU Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia: the neo-liberal agenda was imposed almost everywhere quite successfully, and in not just a few instances more radically than anywhere even in the post-Lehman EU. Some hints at how it works: IMF, shock therapy, race to the bottom.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}